​​​Dr. David Creswell

Dr. David Creswell, PhD., is an associate Professor at the Psychology Department​ at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the United State. Dr.David’s research focuses broadly on understandingwhat makes people resilient under stress. Specifically, he conducts community intervention studies,laboratory studies of stress and coping, and neuroimaging studies to understand how various stressmanagement strategies alter coping and stress resilience. For example, he is currently working on studies that test how mindfulness meditation training impacts the brain, peripheral stress physiologicalresponses, and stress-related disease outcomes in at-risk community samples. David also explores how the use of simple strategies (self-affirmation, rewarding activities, cognitive reappraisal) can buffer stress and improve problem-solving under pressure.David has made some recent research forays into other areas, such as in describing the role of unconscious processes in learning and decision making, developing new theory and research onbehavioral priming, and in building a new field of health neuroscience. He is the lead investigator in the health and human performance at CMU.

Dr. Louise lambert

Dr. Louise Lambert, PhD., is a Registered Psychologist (#2659, College of Alberta Psychologists, Canada) with over 15 years' experience in counselling centres, mental health, not-for-profit organizations, higher education and research, and primary healthcare organizations. She has lived in the United Arab Emirates for eight years and is finishing her current role as Associate Professor at the Canadian University Dubai and will start in January, 2018 with the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) in Al Ain, UAE, where she will be developing the Middle East's first Positive University.

With a concentration in positive psychology, she has developed and delivered many evidence-based positive psychology intervention programs. Her "Happiness 101" program is used in clinical settings and has shown 6-month post treatment effectiveness (Lambert D'raven, Moliver, & Thompson, 2015), while the "Strengths Compass Program", a program used for the development of workplace character strengths in teens, young adults and entry-level employees (Lambert, Budhraja, Mullan, & Gupta, 2018) is being used in Saudi Arabia. More recently, her "Happiness Matters in University" program successfully showed sustainable increases in wellbeing after three months relative to a control group, as well as decreases in the fear of happiness (Lambert, Passmore, & Joshanloo, forthcoming). Her most recent program was adopted by the Kuwait Ministry of Education for use across all government schools under the “Bareec" title and under the patronage of Sheikha Intisar Al Sabah.

She is the co-editor and author of a locally relevant introductory psychology textbook and regional textbook in positive psychology, in which one of those chapters is a proposal for the development of wellbeing policy in the GCC region. Both of these have been accepted for publication by Springer for 2018. Dr. Louise is also the Editor of the Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology, a journal dedicated to uncovering human excellence in the Middle East region and heartily believes that a local, indigenous psychology can and must be nurtured, and has several publications on wellbeing in the region.